8 imaginative UI animation uses to delight your users.

A good mobile app must boast a great UI design and an engaging user experience, of course, but people also judge by appearances. In a crowded marketplace, developers must make sure that their app is beautiful enough to stand out. Animations, when used properly, help reduce cognitive load, attract and direct users’ attention, and make an experience easier to follow.

I work at EffectiveSoft, a custom applications development consultant, which often advises developers on integrating animations into their UIs in order to win over customers. Get it right, and it really works. But use too many animations or use them in the wrong places, and it can create an irritating or noisy experience.

So, when are animations appropriate? This article pulls together some best practices for using animation in mobile apps.

01. Animated app launch screens

Studies show that people expect apps to load instantly, but with complex mobile apps this isn’t always possible. Loading animations can help distract users and make the load time appear shorter than it is. There are a lot of different animation options for load screens.

A simple option is to use an animated logo, as Édouard Puginier has done here in his design for the launch screen of Wit.

Other designers like to get more creative, and tie their animation in with the theme of the app itself or the rest of the branding. In the loader design below, Anton Drokov has animated a spacecraft travelling to the stars.

03. Animated onboarding screens

Software developers understand the importance of the onboarding process. This helps first-time users to become familiar with the app – there’s a real risk people will abandon the app if they do not understand how to work with it.

Showing static slides to users is a common approach to the onboarding experience, but animated walkthroughs are much more engaging, as this calming onboarding animation from Zhenya Rynzhuk proves.

04. Animated progress and activity indicators

It is common knowledge that people are impatient and hate waiting. Developers do their best to ensure their apps work smoothly and speedily but sometimes waiting is inevitable – for example, when something needs to be loaded or a new element is installed.

Apps often employ animated progress or activity indicators to capture users’ attention. These could be circular or linear, and developers tend to choose indeterminate indicators for operations that are performed quickly, and determinate indicators for actions that take more than two to three seconds.

However, some app designers make their activity indicators more distinctive. For example, Domaso’s circular progress indicator has been turned into a cute cat that stretches as it moves.

Other developers have chosen to tap into our obsession with food. Such indicators are a great choice for mobile apps that deal with food delivery, recipes or cooking. For instance, Giedrius Butkus’ mouthwatering pizza preloader design would fit a pizza delivery app perfectly.